Global Urban Policy: A Framework for Analyzing State & Society

David Kaufmann is  Associate Professor of Spatial Development and Urban Policy at ETH Zürich. He serves as the Deputy Director of the Institute for Spatial and Landscape Development and he is the Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal disP – The Planning Review.

He is an urban studies scholar with an interest in planning, policy, and migration studies. His research motivation is to understand and contribute to sustainable, democratic, and just urban development through policy-making and planning.

David Kaufmann studied political science at the University of Zürich and the University of Lund. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Bern in December 2016. He was a guest researcher at the University of Toronto, Leiden University, Virginia Tech, and the University of Ottawa.

He is the co-editor of the book Global Urban Policy (2026, University of Michigan Press), the author of the book Varieties of Capital Cities (2018, Edward Elgar), and the co-author of the book The Political Economy of Capital Cities (2018, Routledge). His work has been published in leading international journals such as PNAS,  Nature Sustainability, Urban Studies, Planning Theory, Journal of the American Planning Association, British Journal of Political Science, and Governance.

David Kaufmann received the 2018 Carl-Goerdeler-Preis for the best Ph.D. thesis about local politics or local administration in business and social sciences in German-speaking countries and the 2020 Clarence Stone Scholar Award as well as the 2017 Susan Clarke Young Scholars’ Award both awarded by the American Political Science Association section Urban and Local Politics for outstanding early career researcher. He also received the 2021 Best Paper in Urban or Regional Politics (together with Dr. Raffaele Bazurli) awarded by the Urban Affairs Review and the American Political Science Association section “Urban and Local Politics” and the 2017 Best Comparative Policy Paper Award(together with Prof. Dr. Fritz Sager) awarded by the journal JCPA and the „IPSA Research Committee on Comparative Studies on Local Governments and Politics”.

At ETH Zürich, he is a member of the Network City and Landscape, ETH for Development, the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy, and of the Center for Comparative and International Studies at ETH Zürich.

Mara Sidney is the co-director and co-founder of the Global Urban Studies doctoral program and Professor of Political Science. Her research and teaching areas include urban politics and policy, race/ethnicity and politics, immigration, and public policy. One thread connecting her work and her teaching is an interest in advocacy organizations and NGOs, their roles in urban governance, and their relationship to public policy. 

Dr. Sidney's current research and writing examines urban policy analysis, gentrification, and urban refugees and immigrants. These are interdisciplinary collaborative projects, some including cross-national comparative work. Her most recent work (with David Kaufmann, ETH-Zurich) focuses on dimensions of urban policy analysis in an edited volume forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. She also has studied how local immigrant-serving NGOs help make a place for immigrants in civic life, and how national and local immigration and social welfare policies shape what NGOs do and how they do it.  Another area of expertise is housing. Dr. Sidney has researched policies designed to combat racial discrimination, including Fair Housing laws and Community Reinvestment laws, along with other affordable housing strategies. She also studied education reform efforts in multiethnic cities. Always, she places special focus on the work of advocacy organizations in cities.  

Theoretically, Dr. Sidney engages social construction, institutionalist, multi-level governance, and critical urban theory approaches, using them to examine inequality – its persistence, transformations, and the possibilities for breaking it down.  

Adam Auerbach is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His research centers on local governance, urban politics, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on South Asia and India in particular. Auerbach is the author of Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India's Urban Slums (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-author of Migrants and Machine Politics: How India's Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness (Princeton University Press, 2023). His articles appear in a variety of journals including the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, World Development, and World Politics. During the 2022-2023 academic year, Auerbach was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in the Social Sustainability and Inclusion Global Practice at the World Bank.